Airship Nation (Darkworld Chronicles Book 2)

by Tom DeMarco

  Jared stood. He had his boxed Effector, already running, under one arm and an overnight pack over his opposite shoulder. He removed a slip from the hat, looked down at it and placed it into his pocket. Then he headed out the door. There was a silent wait after he left before Van Hooten turned to Candace. “Captain Hopkins.”

  When his own turn came, Loren drew the number that corresponded to the Jardines Islands in the Gulf of Ana Maria. The islands ran in a narrow line some twenty five miles off shore, paralleling the south coast of Victoria.

  The Jardines lay 250 miles almost due west of St. James. He would arrive there by noon at the latest. That left him plenty of time to be back at Monterreal by dinner, should he so choose. He could sleep in his own bed tonight. He could, but he decided that he would not. By returning the following day or the day after that, he would convey no information at all as to which sector had been his. He doubted that it would ever matter, but it was important to him.

  The largest of the Jardines was called Cayo Caballones. Without looking at the chart, he knew that it had four large fresh water lakes in its interior, with land around them that would be marshy in places. He had chosen that island months before as an interesting destination for a day trip, perhaps with Kelly. It was just the kind of place where one might hope to spot cranes and ibis and spoonbills. Sign of coming middle age, perhaps: Loren had taken a fancy to birds. He even carried a field guide to Cuban birds in his pack. He stepped up now into the little flyer that had been prepared for him by the ground staff. It was suspended a few feet off the ground with its Effectors already on. He sheeted home the airfoil and glided toward the end of the field, over a precipice and out into the airspace over St. James.

  Loren ran downwind at eight hundred feet over the coast, plotting his course. The sun was still low in the sky behind him to the east. He trimmed up to a heading of two-eight-zero and locked the helm. Then he took out a book of short stories that Kelly had picked out for him for the trip.

  By lunch time, he had placed his unit in an undercut section of the rock face of the Cayo to the north. He had chosen a spot that was virtually inaccessible except by flyer. Then he sat down to eat his sandwiches on a little hill that looked down over the marsh. Through his binoculars he spotted plovers and killdeer and what might have been a black-necked stilt, a bird he had never seen before. There was a spotter’s diary in the back of the book where he had been writing in new sightings, but he made no entry for this day. After eating, he got back into the flyer and headed it south-southeast for a long upwind tack over the Caribbean. Early in the afternoon he turned over the island of Jamaica to take up the opposite tack to the northeast. He skimmed low over the water, approaching Victoria at a level well beneath the tops of low hills that formed the coast.

  Behind the foothills, the Sierra Maestra stretched out to his left. He tacked one more time to gain to the eastward against the trades. By the time he got back to the coast, he was more than sixty miles upwind of St. James and traveling almost directly away from the city. The coast was flatter here to the east of Guantanamo. He suspected that there would be a thermal coming off the land as it cooled in the late afternoon. He found it down at about thirty feet, right on the beach. With that breeze on his left side, he steered directly up the coast to the east, on a course that would have been into the teeth of the trade winds had not the thermal been overriding them. By early evening, he had spotted the cliffs of Punta Caleta.

  He picked a low hill behind the beach and banked the flyer in to pull up onto a grassy meadow near the top of the hill. Then he walked down across a narrow gorge to camp on the beach. The little thatched roof cabana he had set up for Sonia on an afternoon four years earlier was still standing. That was when they had traveled here to conceal two of the first set of backup Effectors. He ignored the cabana and pitched his tent further down the beach.

  In the morning, he re-heated some coffee from the night before. There were still some fruit and nuts in his pack, enough for a simple breakfast. He was on his way west down the beach by 6 AM. So far, he had avoided thinking about his last visit to this spot, avoided thinking about Sonia. But now he tried to put himself exactly in her mind as she had headed down this beach on that long ago day at about this same hour. She had been carrying her Effector then in her backpack. She had taken the easy route into the interior along the Caleta River, whose mouth should be only a few miles down the coast from where he had begun. He was timing himself, trying to repeat as nearly as possible the timing of her trip that day. She had left at approximately 6 in the morning, and returned a little after 4 PM. That meant she had probably continued inland until about 11 AM.

  When he arrived at the mouth of the river, he was encouraged to see that the water had cut deeply into the foothills; the river emerged through a high-sided gorge. If it remained so deeply cut all the way in, he might expect to be following exactly the path that Sonia had selected when she had come this way. That was what he hoped to do. He would walk up along the river bank until about 10 and then begin looking for a way up into the hills or a place to hide something. In this, he would be repeating exactly the thinking that had guided Sonia. If he succeeded in thinking as she had then, he might find what he was looking for.

  As 10 o’clock approached, the gorge had become, if anything, deeper and narrower. There was no place to turn off. For some of the distance there was not even a bank on either side of the river and he had to wade through the stream against its flow. He picked up a sturdy stick to steady himself in the water. Within half an hour, he had come to a place where no further progress was possible: The water came pouring out of a narrow cut that went up sixty feet on each side, solid rock. He wasn’t about to wade into that, and Sonia wouldn’t have either. So, if she did get this far, she would have turned back to proceed downstream again, looking for her spot as she did.

  Loren turned around and began working his way back down the river. There were two rock falls on the west side of the river, either one of which he could have climbed with some difficulty. But he passed them by. With so much loose rock underfoot, they looked unappealing. He was sure that Sonia wouldn’t have chosen either of them. He also passed up a rock face that had a series of horizontal cuts across it that made it technically climbable. It was likely that Sonia could have climbed it, and made it up to the ledge, perhaps thirty feet above. But he had his doubts whether he could do that himself. He reasoned that Sonia wouldn’t have chosen that route because, even sure footed as she was, it would have involved some risk. She would have been unlikely to chance it when there was every hope that something easier might lie just beyond the next bend.

  He was trying to put himself inside the head of a woman he had never really understood. She had been a cipher, as Kelly had said, always a cipher. In retrospect, her mystery had been part of what had attracted him to her. There was something utterly foreign about Sonia, almost alien. He had never understood her, but never given up either. One day, he had supposed, her inner workings would be revealed to him. Now he knew that would never happen. But today, oddly, he felt for the first time connected to her mind. It was as if she were walking beside him, and he was observing her in the flesh. He had the strongest sense of following not just the general direction she had taken four years ago, but in her very footsteps.

  At the next turn in the river, Loren sat down on the sunny side bank and ate a box of raisins he had carried in his pocket. The sun felt good. He lay back in the sun to rest a moment after his sparse meal. Sonia, he felt, had rested here as well. Anything he did was something she might have done too. He stared straight up toward the blue sky. Rising up above him was a good sized pine tree. It paralleled the rock face only a few feet from it. Loren supposed that she could have climbed that tree and used it to attain the ledge above. Only it would have been messy. The bark was bound to be loaded with pine pitch. He thought Sonia far too fastidious to have used that route. There was a wide ledge on the opposite bank, he noticed, perhaps twenty or twenty five feet above
the water. Above that ledge were cliffs that were cut deeply with volcanic vents and tubes. He allowed his eye to travel down along the ledge to the point where it was intersected by a tall Live Oak tree. He sat up. The tree had its foot in the bank about ten feet out from the wall. The wall angled out into the gorge, leaning toward the tree. At the height of the ledge, there was one strong branch that reached over the edge and up toward the cliff face beyond. It was not just a path that Sonia might have used; it was the one she had used, he suddenly knew that.

  Loren crossed the river to the base of the tree. The trunk rose up some ten feet to the first branch. It was about 18 inches in diameter, covered with smooth grey bark. He could see Sonia casually walking up the trunk of the tree, but it was more of a struggle for him. Not too much, though. By the time he dropped down onto the ledge, he had barely worked up a sweat.

  There were a dozen cave-like apertures in the cliff face in front of him. Loren rejected the first of these because it was open at the top, offering no protection from the elements. He headed up toward one of the other, more promising caves. But as he moved to pass the exposed opening, something caught his eye in the interior. The sun had glinted on a bit of polished yellow wood. Sitting in the middle of the cave floor, unprotected, was the little inlaid box that Pease had made to house the Effector that Sonia was meant to conceal. It was empty. At the back of the shallow cave, he came upon a small pile of boulders. Loren lifted the top few boulders to expose the thing he had come expecting to find. It was the wreckage of a Persistent Effector. The metal and glass mechanism had been crushed, pulverized as though hammered repeatedly with a large rock against the stone floor.

  Understanding Sonia in a purely intellectual way had been beyond him. Now, for a moment, he understood on a different level, the visceral. Again she was here before him. He could sense her presence in the cave, kneeling beside the Effector with the rock in both hands above her head. She brought it down with all her might. And then again. And then again. A strangled cry escaped her lips as contact was made. There was distress in that cry, and pain. But more than that, much more, the sound was made of hatred.

  It was mid-afternoon by the time he got back to the little flyer. With a decent wind he would be back in St. James for dinner.

  He felt a fine thread connecting himself to Sonia. The thread left his body to extend across the backbone mountains of Victoria and over the Straights of Florida beyond. It led somewhere into the interior of America, he wasn’t sure where. But he had a sense of where it was not: She had not returned to Ithaca. Loren couldn’t explain how he knew that so surely, but he knew it. At the other end of the thread, he could feel her moving.

  Kelly was asleep in the bed behind him as he gazed out the wide window to the north. Everything was quiet in Monterreal, everyone asleep except for himself and the main floor guards. Sonia was out there somewhere far away, moving, awake at this moment as he was. He tried to sense through the thread what she was thinking or at least how she felt. What came back to him was a blank. It had almost always been a blank, even when the distance between them had been only a few feet or a few inches. All he could sense now was her movement, her awakeness.

  When he thought of her this night, it was without affection. Love had died—maybe it had never existed at all. The word love had no meaning for him except in the context of Kelly and Shimna. All his love was focused in this very room. He could not think of Sonia with kindness or good will. But that did not mean he didn’t think of her at all.

  During their time together she was a friend, but not a lover. Now she seemed to be a lover and not a friend. When she came into his mind, it was as a purely erotic image. He imagined handling her roughly, using her. There was a touch of cruelty in the image, and the cruelty enhanced its power over him. All her elegance was undone for the satisfaction of his own casual lust, and she lent herself to this degradation because she was helpless to resist. That was the picture that kept coming back to him: Sonia, undone, in tears, begging him to respect her and then begging him not to, but to have his way of her. He hated himself for the thought, but it wouldn’t go away.

  For the physicist Lamar Armitage, the Martine-Chan theory of quantum time opened up possibilities that would occupy him for the rest of his life. His interest was in the theory, not any practical application of it. The practical side of the subject had no appeal to him at all. Even the airships had not seemed to him to be so terribly remarkable. Once he had been over the equations with Peter Chan, he looked at the seeming contradiction of the law of gravity implied by a floating airship as too obvious to be of any further interest. But the theory was fascinating. And the most interesting aspect of it for him was the possibility that there might exist particles and waves of time, just as there are particles and waves of light. Armitage began to think of the river of time as made up of tiny marbles moving beside and over and under each other. He started the construction of an elaborate mathematical model of this concept of time.

  The main computer laboratory of St. James was in a low building inside the grounds of Monterreal Castle. Since Armitage had been invited by the Princess to make his home in the castle, the lab was convenient for him. And it was just his kind of place: a total shambles of computers and electrical gear scrounged from the Cuban universities and corporations. Aside from the few Mac laptops they had brought along themselves, most of the computers were out of date PCs. The constant occupation of the staff was isolating working boards and components of non-working computers and swapping them into other non-working computers. At any given time there would be only a dozen or so completely operational systems. The level of the technology was a far cry from the modern lab he had run at Johns Hopkins, but that didn’t matter so much; the local equipment was only a link to the computing power of SHIELA, and that was undiminished. Armitage was logged onto SHIELA almost every night, deeply involved in writing a computer simulation of the flow of time.

  He would sit in front of a computer terminal connected through a small dish up to SHIELA, and key in and modify the datasets that were the guts of his simulation. At his side was an assistant, a young Jamaican woman who had a gift for computing and a fascination with it. They worked together most nights. She was beside him now as he stared perplexedly at the screen before him. She looked up, surprised, when Armitage exclaimed; he was usually so unflappable.

  “Whooaa…” he said. And then, after a moment: “This is something that Loren has got to see.” He jumped up and exited without another word to the woman. In a few seconds he was back. “You must go, Yazmin, I can’t go barging into the Princess’s bedroom. Run up to the castle and wake Loren. Tell him to come down here urgently. Go. Run. Quick.”

  She went out into the courtyard and into the castle proper. The apartments were on the top floor she knew, but she wasn’t too sure where. At the top of the stairs, she came across Shimna’s nurse, a young Indian woman, sleeping on a window seat opposite a heavy pair of closed doors. She woke the woman and explained what was required. Together, they went into the bedroom and roused Loren.

  “Dr. Armitage says you must come at once,” Yazmin said. ”Please come.”

  “Yes.” Loren struggled to wake up. He knew he had to jump up and do as she said, but he also knew there was some reason he must not.

  Beside him in the bed, Kelly rolled over, more awake than he. “Scoot girls. Off you go. Or you’re going to see the captain in his altogether. He’ll be right along.”

  The two young women ran out in a flurry of giggles. Loren got up and put on a robe. He went down the stairs in his bare feet, across the flagstone courtyard to the lab. It seemed from the color of the sky to be about an hour before dawn. He found Armitage standing in front of his terminal, too excited to sit down. Displayed on the screen was a memory map of SHIELA’s internal layout.

  “There is space gone, Loren, space that wasn’t used up before. I am the only one on-line that I know of. But there are files here that I didn’t create. There are files that have been cha
nged in the last twenty-four hours, not by me.” He reached out with a bony finger toward the screen, stabbing at the date and time associated with one program file. “Look, this one was modified less than an hour ago. He moved his finger from the column indicating last modification time all the way to the left where the file names were listed. The name of the modified file was Revelation-13, the program that controlled the Hard Body lasers.

  There was a log that SHIELA maintained of who had been signed on during what period. It would show the name of the user who had modified the file. “Display the log, Lamar,” Loren said. It was the correct thing to do, but he had no need to see the log to understand what had happened. He knew who had been logged on. He could feel it through the thread.

  “I don’t know how to do that. I can never remember the system utility commands,” Armitage lamented. “Do you know how to access the log?”